Can this be true?

According to Senator Kennedy, more kids have asthma in this country thanks to air and water pollution. Which is something that may or may not be true, but what I found interesting was the way Kennedy wound down his tantrum, asking in a sincere and breathless tone just what Alito would do, as a Supreme Court Justice, to stem this asthma scourge.

Can it really be possible that someone who has been a U.S. Senator for decades is this patently obtuse when it comes to the role of the Supreme Court in American government? Because the last time I checked Supreme Court Justices didn’t write environmental policy. Instead, they rule as to whether or not laws written by state and federal legislators are, in fact, in keeping with our Constitution.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but this is something I learned in the sixth grade.

LifeTrek thinks that Kennedy may in fact be part of the problem. If you haven’t read “Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed” you need to. It dovetails perfectly with LifeTrek’s comment.

According to the OSU Daily Baramoter the number is quite high.

According to a press release issued by the Women’s Center, 2,000 rapes occur every five minutes.

But Eugene Volokh found the source:

About 2,000 rapes are committed daily at the rate of about one every 5 minutes.

And then he checks the math (via Insty).

2,000 rapes every five minutes. That would mean 2000 x (60/5) x 24 x 365 = 200 million rapes a year (presumably in the U.S.). Many people underestimate the frequency of rape. Still, one would hope that it doesn’t happen 200 million times a year; at least a little bit of multiplication should have alerted the writer and the editor that something was wrong.

…

Not 2,000 rapes every five minutes, it turns out, but 2,000 rapes daily, or one every 5 minutes. Off by a factor of 300 (5 x 60) from how the newspaper rendered it.

But wait! A “rate of about one every 5 minutes” would be about 300 daily ((60/5) x 24), not about 2000 daily. The Women’s Center press release was also mistaken (on at least one of the statistics, and maybe both); and again a little multiplication would have helped catch this.

In the comments section on his post, Eugene is getting some heat for his observation, as some readers are inferring that he is indicating that rape is not a serious problem. I think his point is that sloppy reporting and the lack of critical thinking can lead to false statistics which can discredit the validity of the reporting and in fact undermine the severity of the problem through transparently inflationary reporting (whether intentional or not).

The Washington Post reports on a study of hidden biases. In particular, Bush supporters are biased against blacks.

Michelle Malkin notes that they know something of hidden biases, exposing the political contributions of the authors of the study (sourced here).

KOS is keeping track of the committed and iffy cloture votes. To date, committed to voting no on cloture (supporting fillibuster) are:

Barbara Boxer (D- CA)
Dianne Feinstein (D- CA)
Christopher J. Dodd (D- CT)
Richard J. Durbin (D- IL)
John F. Kerry (D- MA)
Edward M. Kennedy (D- MA)
Paul S. Sarbanes (D- MD)
Debbie A. Stabenow (D- MI)
Harry Reid (D- NV)
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D- NY)
Charles Schumer (D- NY)
Ron Wyden (D- OR)
Russell D. Feingold (D- WI)
Barack Obama (D-IL)
Joe Biden (D-DE)

And liberal “Republican” Lincoln Chafee will be voting against Alito (but presumably not voting no on cloture).

UPDATE: Alexandra at All Things Beautiful has a big roundup of this story. The left wing bloggers are going all out on this issue, including urging readers to make repeat calls to offices which do not take details such as names and addresses.

That is, go through the “Urge Abstention” list twice, at least for those offices that don’t take detailed caller info like names and addresses.

Captain Ed aptly says: “If your cause boils down to tactics such as these, then everyone associated with it should be embarrassed by the connection. Hopefully, an intrepid news crew will wait outside of Walter Reed to see any Democrats inclined to endorse methods such as those urged by this blogger.”

Gateway Pundit has come out in an early sign of support, urging fellow bloggers to support Cindy Sheehan’s run for the Senate.

Cindy has been to Washington DC before, but the US Senate needs Cindy now more than ever:

* To distribute wealth evenly
* To help set up a Department of Peace
* To set up a Department of History where Cindy will be the first Secretary!
* To get the occupiers out of New Orleans
* To fight the perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire
* To build a world in which the human being is really human
* To stop concealing torture camps in other countries allied to the empire
* To stop our government and corporatism from impoverishing or killing innocents
* To stop an invasion of Venezuela
* To stop US President George W. Bush of “terrorism against the world”
* To sing communist hymns with fists raised
* To teach our troops that “Hajis,” the brown skinned people of Iraq who clean their toilets, showers, and wash their clothes are NOT less than people

CindyForSenate. And Michelle Malkin picks Cindy and Hugo hugging as the picture of the day.

Taylor Marsh, who bills herself as “the antidote to Right-Wing talk,” thinks Cindy Sheehan has lost her mind.

She should have stuck to her anti-Iraq war platform and left the celebrity politicking to Sean Penn. But announcing a challenge to Senator Diane Feinstein, from Venezuela? This is weird in so many ways it’s impossible to recount them all.

…

Any reader of this blog knows that I’m not a fan of our pathetically incompetent president, but let’s get serious. George W. Bush “the biggest terrorist in the world”? Unfathomable. To say so is preposterous, not to mention that it blows Ms. Sheehan’s credibility out of the water. It’s impossible to take anyone seriously who uses this type of language against the president of the United States. You also don’t bash your country’s leadership, especially in a foreign country. I’m old fashioned that way. When on foreign soil you don’t denigrate your country or the president, regardless of who it is or how you feel, period.

But again, threatening to challenge Diane Feinstein while in Venezuela? Words escape me, almost.

Ms. Sheehan evidently believes in Chavez’s “21st Century Socialism,” as do a lot of other righteous far left activists. However, I completely disavow any association with this type of rhetoric, philosophy, or political goal. In my humble opinion, it is against everything on which the Founders built this republic, everything.

…

The last thing I want to see is a cat fight between Sheehan and Feinstein, which would be a political fodder fight of the first order. Since the most committed always wins, you’ve still got to wonder which of these women would have the most loyal supporters. The unknown answer to that question terrifies me.

Yes, a Senate run by Cindy Sheehan would be the best thing to happen to conservative politics in a while.

James Blake Miller, the marine made famous by the photo in which he was dubbed Iraq’s “Marlboro Man,” has come home. The San Francisco Chronicle has a bio of Miller and a discussion of the details of that day. There is one thing that jumped out at me, which I’ve emphasized below.

As Miller remembers that day, he was on a rooftop taking fire and calling for support on his radio - a 20-pound piece of equipment that he had to lug around along with nine extra batteries, hundreds of extra rounds of ammunition, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes.

As insurgent bullets from a nearby building pinged off the roof, a horrified Miller heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. He raised his rifle — and barely had time to halt when he saw it was embedded Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco.

Miller returned to his radio, guiding two tanks to his position. When they opened fire, he said, the thunder left his body numb — but the building housing the attackers had collapsed. Later, he said, they would find about 40 bodies in the rubble.

“I was never so happy in all my life to take that handset away from my head,” Miller said. “I lit up a f — cigarette.”

His ear was bleeding from the sound of the tank firing — Miller still can’t hear out of his right ear. His nose bled from a nick he took when his rifle scope and radio got tangled up midfire. He looked at the sunrise and wondered how many more of those he would see.

He was vaguely aware that elsewhere on the rooftop, Sinco was taking pictures.

Many would applaud the bravery of Luis Sinco, risking his life to report from the thick of the battle, to bring news of the war front to those back home. Indeed, Mr. Sinco took a striking photo that day. But look at what really happened, as Miller recalls it.

Miller was taking enemy fire, directing two tanks into position to take out the building from which the enemy was firing, and he had to stop and turn around to defend himself from what turned out to be an embedded reporter. He then went back to the business of directing the tank into position and they opened fire, collapsing the building and killing the insurgents.

That photographer could have cost him his life. Mr. Sinco could have, in fact, caused those two tanks to not be able to get into position, to not take out that building, and to leave those insurgents to come and fight and kill our soldiers another day.

Sure, we like to get news in real time. Sure we have an insatiable desire for information and images, which drives up ratings and encourages brave reporters like Sinco to risk their lives like this. But is it worth the risk? Is our desire to know worth the chance that a reporter will cause death and damage the war effort in a very real and measurable way? Are embedded reporters really a good idea? This anecdote would indicate that it may be something to think about.